46 Chapter 2 Theories of Personality
life. The child settles into a supposedly non-
sexual latency stage, in preparation for the genital
stage, which begins at puberty and leads to adult
sexuality.
In Freud’s view, therefore, your adult person-
ality is shaped by how you progressed through
the early psychosexual stages, which defense
mechanisms you developed to reduce anxiety, and
whether your ego is strong enough to balance theto marry Daddy (or Mommy) when I grow up,”
and they reject the same-sex “rival.” Freud labeled
this phenomenon the Oedipus complex, after the
Greek legend of King Oedipus, who unwit-
tingly killed his father and married his mother.
(Although Freud was tolerant of homosexuality,
he could not have imagined that one day many
same-sex couples would be raising children!)
Boys and girls, Freud believed, go through the
Oedipal stage differently. Boys are discovering the
pleasure and pride of having a penis, so when they
see a naked girl for the first time, they are horri-
fied. Their unconscious exclaims (in effect), “Her
penis has been cut off! Who could have done such
a thing to her? Why, it must have been her power-
ful father. And if he could do it to her, my father
could do it to me!” This realization, said Freud,
causes the boy to repress his desire for his mother
and identify with his father. He accepts his father’s
authority and the father’s standards of conscience
and morality; the superego has emerged.
Freud admitted that he did not quite know
what to make of girls, who, lacking a penis, could
not go through the same steps. He speculated
that a girl, on discovering male anatomy, would
panic that she had only a puny clitoris instead of
a stately penis and conclude that she already had
lost her penis. As a result, Freud said, girls do not
have the powerful motivating fear that boys do
to give up their Oedipal feelings and develop a
strong superego; they have only a lingering sense
of “penis envy.”
Freud believed that when the Oedipus com-
plex is resolved, at about age 5 or 6, the child’s
personality is fundamentally formed. Unconscious
conflicts with parents, unresolved fixations and
guilt, and attitudes toward the same and the other
sex will continue to replay themselves throughoutOedipus complex In
psychoanalysis, a conflict
occurring in the phallic
(Oedipal) stage, in which
a child desires the parent
of the other sex and views
the same-sex parent as
a rival.
“I’m sorry, I’m not speaking to anyone tonight.
My defense mechanisms seem to be out of order.”© The New Yorker Collection 1985 Joseph Mirachi
from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.A Freudian might say that this man’s obsessive smoking
is a sign he has an oral fixation.